Thank you Adam from St Alban's School and Andrei from Tudor Vianu
National College, Bucharest, Romania for your solutions to this
problem.
Ball A moves down a frictionless inclined plane. Its velocity
at the base of the plane is determined from the law of conservation
of energy:
The gravitational potential energy (given on the left side) is
transformed into kinetic energy at the base of the plane. Here the
zero level for the potential gravitational energy is fixed to be the
horizontal at the base of the plane, and the gravitational field of
the Earth is supposed to be uniform.
From the previous equation,
is determined as:
.
After that, ball A collides with ball B at rest. We assume ball A is
moving horizontally with velocity
when it collides with ball
B. After the collision the horizontal velocities of balls A and B
are
and
respectively. The collision is characterised by
the coefficient of restitution k:
and by the law of conservation of momentum:
In this particular case,
Solving the system of 2 equations for the unknowns,
and
:
and
, i.e. after collision both balls move
in the same horizontal direction as the direction of ball A before
collision, ball B quicker than ball A.
Ball B is then projected horizontally with velocity
.
Associating to the movement a system of cartesian axes and measuring
time from
when ball B is at height
then when the ball hits
the ground: